Other than a tendency to waste an entire weekend watching a “Real World” marathon when my family was out of town, I haven’t watched MTV in a while. I still catch a few minutes of the channel’s annual movie awards show, which is silly fun, now and then. I might try “Teen Wolf,” which looks intriguing, when I have a spare minute. But the reality TV genre that “The Real World” spawned doesn’t appeal much.

And there doesn’t seem to be much on MTV these days besides reality shows. Same for VH1, which used to be a showcase for the videos that MTV had already abandoned but is now consumed with shows about celebrity wannabes and never-gonna-bes.

But the purpose of this blog entry isn’t to criticize MTV today but to remember MTV back then.

After all, the channel’s 30th anniversary is upon us.

Okay, let’s think about that for a minute. Thirty years.

Holy crap, we’re getting old.

I still remember vividly the heyday of music videos in the 1980s. Like every young adult at the time, I turned in to see every lame and cool video that premiered. My friend Brian and I practically raced to his apartment to watch the premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video in 1983.

And the VJs. I loved the VJs. How cool was J.J. Jackson? How cute was Martha Quinn? How amazing was it to realize Nina Blackwood appeared in Playboy?

Although some of the videos are painful to watch now, they seemed like milestones at the time. How cool it was to see some of the biggest hits of the day come to life. Oh, and the David Lee Roth videos too.

While I enjoyed MTV, I think I liked the overnight videos show that aired on TBS even better. For five or six hours, the channel showed back-to-back-to-back videos interrupted only occasionally by commercials.

I stuck with MTV for years, even after videos were being replaced by programming. I loved the game show “Remote Control,” loved Jon Stewart’s show and the aforementioned “Real World.”

Of course, it seems like a million years ago now. But it’s been only 30 years.

Only 30.